Wikipedia has several different classifications of articles. They are Featured Articles, Good Articles (also known as A Class Articles), copy edited articles (also called B and C Class Articles) and non-copy edited articles (also called Stub and Start articles) (“Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment”). Featured Articles have been thoroughly edited, sourced, expanded and deemed to live up to most scrutiny. Good Articles have been extensively edited, sourced and are considered to quite literally be in good condition. Project Rated Articles are those which have support from a particular project on Wikipedia and have been assigned a level of importance as well as a quality assessment. Copy edited articles are those with a small to moderate amount of information, usually with many references and sources and have often been copy edited for content, tone and readability. Lastly, non-copy edited articles are those which have not had any sort of copy edit review, assessment, or adoption by a project and are often in very poor non-encyclopedic form. To the casual observer, this represents a system in which certain articles are quite reliable and continues in a descending order or reliability from most to least.
Wikipedia has recently been the subject of various media reports. Some of these reports have either been highly supportive of Wikipedia as being generally reliable and others have been very critical. Beginning with the most critical a Scottish news source,
Scotsman.com News, recently ran an article which described high school school students failing their exams at an increasing and alarming rate. The author describes, “The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information…” (McLaughlin). This illustrates that the information being taken from Wikipedia and being used in for school reports and for exam preparation. However, the topics in which these students are taking information from is riddled with so many errors that the students are receiving failing marks on homework and exams. In response to this Wikipedia states, “While Wikipedia articles generally attain a good standard after editing, it is important to note that fledgling, or less well monitored, articles may be susceptible to vandalism and insertion of false information.” (“Wikipedia:Verifiability”). This brings up interesting and valid points. The first is possible vandalism to the articles in which these students were accessing. The
Scotsman.com News does not include a list or topic in which these students were attempting to write about, thus an examination of possible vandalism is impossible. Vandalism is an endemic problem on Wikipedia, as Wikipedia servers do not require people to register an account before being able to alter and edit a page. However, a related policy about Wikipedia vandalism states, “Repetitively and intentionally making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia will result in a block or permanent ban.” (“Wikipedia:Vandalism”). Thus, Wikipedia does indeed have an official policy as to how it deals with vandalism. Those who vandalize Wikipedia can be blocked for short periods of time, extending longer or outright banned from the project altogether. The other main issue is the insertion of false or misleading information into these articles. While, again, the exact articles which were used for this high school issue are not available for review or comment making it impossible to ascertain for certain. It certainly is possible, at least in theory, that fellow students may have gone to the relevant Wikipedia pages and quite simply changed the information to be inaccurate. Some students with a competitive nature can conceiveably do such a thing. Other students with a more vindictive nature might do similar. This brings up the interesting issue of reliability and verifiability of Wikipedia. An official policy of Wikipedia says, “Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source.” (“Wikipedia: Reliable Sources”). While it is clear Wikipedia has such a policy regarding verifiability and reliability of information, the question must be begged is if this followed.
While Wikipedia has gotten a great deal of criticism for it’s perceived lack of reliability, a systematic study of Wikipedia by the journal Nature has concluded that Wikipedia articles are generally reliable. As quoted in USA Today, “Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica” (Goodin). Nature had fifty scholars and experts in various scientific areas assigned 42 articles within the area of their expertise. The scholars were not told of the source of the articles, but were instead asked to review the content and make comments regarding the reliability, lack of context or confusion in content. After thorough review, Nature concluded that while each Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica had errors, these errors were the exception and not the rule. As stated by Nature, “The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” (Giles ). However, due to Wikipedia’s dynamic nature and speed of editing, as Nature describes, the editing and reliability for these articles could be quickly and easily improved, as well as adding or removing content for clarity. The Nature article wrought the ire of Encyclopedia Britannica who wrote scathing and very critical response to the Nature article in which they indicated that the Nature process was flawed, inconsistent and Encyclopedia Britannica stood by their authors and called for a complete retraction of the Nature article (“Fatally Flawed”). In a response letter, Nature stated, “We do not intend to retract our article.” (“Nature's responses”).
Additionally, there have been more attempts by other peer-reviewed journals to ascertain the reliability of scientific articles on Wikipedia. First Monday is a collection of free, peer-reviewed journals about the Internet. In a paper published on their website, it is stated, “The results show an increasing use of structured citation markup and good agreement with citation patterns seen in the scientific literature though with a slight tendency to cite articles in high–impact journals such as Nature and Science. These results increase confidence in Wikipedia as a reliable information resource for science in general.” (Nielsen). Thus, by virtue of these two scholarly examinations of scientific articles on Wikipedia, one can assume that such articles are generally reliable.
Utilizing the same method as First Monday, a single and randomly chosen Featured Article, Good Article, Copy Edited Article and non-Copy Edited Article will be examined to determine reliability. The references of each randomly chosen article will be examined and assessed for accuracy and use of professional and academic sources. This method should be sufficient in order to see if the general trend in Wikipedia is to accurately and appropriately attribute information using reliable sources. An associated policy of Wikipedia regarding so-called reliable sources states, “Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.” (“Wikipedia:Reliable Sources”) While this may be a Wikipedia policy, the so-called ‘malarial swamps’ often contain improper, little or no references.
The randomly selected Featured Article is List of counties in Arizona (“List of counties in Arizona”). This article is well developed with many images and charts. It gives a clear and seemingly objective history of the counties in Arizona, including years formed, populations, county seat and a brief history of each county. Included in the descriptions are links to full articles on each county, which contains more information. Despite being a Featured Article this article only contains six separate references. While some of these references are used more than once in the article, there remains only six sources total. The following is a copy of the references used:
Upon investigation of the first source published by Higginson Books and review of the company’s website, it was determined that this publishing house allows for self-publishing of books and advertises for a 6-8 week turn around on submitted material. Wikipedia’s Verifiability policy states, “Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, and then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, knols, forum postings, and similar sources are largely not acceptable.” (“Wikipedia:Verifiability”). Thus, this first source may not be considered reliable according to some. (Author’s note: this issue has been referred to the appropriate Wikipedia forum, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_counties_in_Arizona#Higgins_Books.) Scarecrow Press, which published a book used for several references, is an industry known publishing company and is considered very reliable. The rest of the sources are government sources, which are also considered to be reliable. In summary, the sources utilized for references are by-and-large reliable and acceptable, however at least one seems to violate Wikipedia policy. How this went on undetected is unknown and concerning. However, it would seem that most of the references used were done appropriately and were well selected.
jk.
